QOTD category archive

Montesquieu, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman.

Kenzo Tange:

Tradition can, to be sure, participate in a creation, but it can no longer be creative itself.

Gore Vidal, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The period of Prohibition–called the noble experiment–brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people.

Thomas de Quincey:

In many walks of life, a conscience is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife or a carriage.

Willard Van Orman Quine:

One man’s observation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy.

Daniel Boorstein, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

Douglas Adams, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.

Nikita Kruschev, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

Religious persecutors are not believers, they are rascals.

James Thurber:

Discussion in America means dissent.

Robert Benchley:

Behind every argument is someone’s ignorance.

Agatha Christie:

The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.

Dorothy L. Sayers:

Every time a man expects, as he says, his money to work for him, he is expecting other people to work for him.

Isaac Asimov:

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.

William McChesney Martin, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Too many of our prejudices are like pyramids upside down. They rest on tiny, trivial incidents, but they spread upward and outward until they fill our minds.

Barry Goldwater, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternative.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

F. Lee Bailey:

Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today?

It wouldn’t even get out of committee.

Thomas Aquinas:

Beware of the person of one book.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

A god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.